Don't Eat With Your Mouth Full

Where can we live but days?

I wonder why, of all diseases, cancer is the one most often characterized in terms of an alien entity, an invasive enemy one is expected to "fight"? People "beat" cancer or "lose their battle" with cancer, phrases far less often invoked with reference to, say, measles, botulism or pneumonia, even though all those conditions really are caused by alien entities, and their treatments involve massacring the little blighters by the thousand. Whereas most cancers, as I understand it, are merely our cellular selves gone haywire. Why do we (or at any rate the newspapers) turn to the language of the abject for their discussion? Is our bodies' betrayal so horrible to contemplate that we would rather think in terms of a siege than that the enemy is within the gates?

Laying these lugubrious thoughts firmly aside and turning to the Burlington Arcadia... I leave early tomorrow, and will be arriving at Logan around 7pm, so I doubt I'll be up to much socializing that night. But Friday, d.v., will find me perky, and probably pink too.

There are loads of references to "battling" tuberculosis in literature of the late 19th/early 20th century (though it is not always the patient fighting; often it's the doctors), which suggests that it was a common terminology then for that disease.

Several possibilities: it was a lengthy illness (or could be), so that counteracting it could assume the character of a "campaign"; there was a degree of patient involvement - they weren't generally lying unconscious; there wasn't a single cure (such as an antibiotic that would take it out), so much as a regimen requiring such soldierly qualities as discipline and perseverance.

The wonderful Anthony Wilson wrote a book of poems about having lymphoma. It's called "Riddance" - I highly recommend it. He gets incensed by this particular trope. I spoke to him about it and we agreed that if cancer is a battle, then it is between the cancer and the medicine. The patient is merely the battlefield.

The inherent danger in that language is that the "courageous" patient gamely "fights" the cancer and there is a subtle insinuation that if only he could try harder and fight more, he would "beat" it. And so people who die of cancer become morally inferior to those who survive.

In extreme cases, patients try so hard to "fight" with alternative therapies, positive mental attitudes and so on that they turn to conventional medicine far too late. There are people who say that's what happened to Steve Jobs.

Now hoping that won#t sound clueless and patronising but I am cis and thus reliant on my valued trans friends to teach me not to be clueless... so I'll just shut up and trust that you know what I mean... :-)